More than 20 developers visited the ‘Hadoop-driven digital preservation Hackathon’ in Vienna which took place in the baroque room called “Oratorium” of the Austrian National Library from 2nd to 4th of December 2013.

It’s been two weeks since the internal SCAPE developer workshop in Brno, Czech Republic. It was a great workshop. We had a lot of presentations and demos, and were brought up to date on what’s going on in the other corners of the SCAPE project. We also had some (loud) discussions, but I think we came to some good agreements on where we as developers are going next. And we started a number of development and productisation activities.

Lovebytes currently holds an archive of digital media assets representing 19 years of the organisation’s activities in the field of digital art and a rich historical record of emerging digital culture at the turn of the century. It contains original artworks in a wide variety of formats, video and audio documentation of events alongside websites and print objects.

In June 2013 we were delighted to receive an award from SPRUCE, which enabled us to devise and test a digital preservation plan for the archive through auditing, migrating and stabilising a representative sample of material, concentrating on migrating digital video and Macromedia Director files.

The preservation of audio CDs is something that is slightly different from the preservation of CDs containing data other than audio. Data on audio CDs cannot be easily cloned for preservation, as the music industry has lobbied the main operating system developers to curtail the duplication of CDs to crack down on the mass production of pirate copies. While this is understandable from an intellectual property perspective, it is rather problematic from a preservation viewpoint.